Those wishing to contact me in the near future …

by Henry on December 1, 2012

Should use my GWU address farrellhRemoveThisBit@gwu.edu. My gmail address is down – extra storage space that I had purchased from Google expired (it was linked to a credit card that I had lost), and while I’ve purchased some new storage from them, they appear to be in no particular hurry to apply it. This is all especially annoying as the only notice I had that there was a problem was a single email a few weeks ago (which I missed in the flood and have only seen ex post), and in cancelling my storage space, they have also likely permanently deleted some space which I had as a legacy user of their storage service before Google Drive. Apologies for wasting the bandwidth of 99% of Crooked Timber readers with this (although you can take it if you like as an instructional example of the hazards of entrusting a large chunk of your life to a company that is usually efficient on big-scale stuff, but not particularly concerned about managing its relationship with small end-customers to those customers satisfaction).

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Well, this comes at an inopportune time, as I am making my final preparations to move my primary e-mail address from my university-hosted address to gmail. All things considered, would you recommend going through with this or calling it off?

Most people don’t have much to worry about. The overwhelming majority won’t ever get near the point of needing extra storage space, much less having it expire out from under them. Even if you do get near your space limit, the solution can be as simple as connecting with a normal e-mail client like Thunderbird or Outlook Express and downloading your messages to your main computer via POP. This wouldn’t be an adequate solution for a business of any significant size, but it’ll be fine for the overwhelming majority of individuals.